The fact that the color question is the question of the
day, attracting more or less attention throughout our entire country--North,
East, West and South--makes everything pertaining to the negro--his past, his
present, his future, his educational, his moral, his financial status--all the
more important In fact, the negro is at present the center of attraction. All
eyes are turned toward him and he is served up in short story and in long, in
history and in fiction, in prose and in poetry, as it may suit the fancy of men.

Scientists,
theologians, men of letters and even the politicians, are all
trying to solve what they call the "Negro Problem"--Whither
is the negro drifting? What will eventually become of him? Will he
in time lose his identity in the heterogeneity of the American
people? or will he maintain his racial characteristics despite
circumstances? or finally will he, like the barbarianhordes
of the orient, imbibe a migratory spirit and conclude to leave
these shores for a more congenial clime? These are the questions
that arise daily by "germs and by fractions" in every
paper that one takes up. Some affirm one thing, some
another.

Suffice it to say, however, despite the
discussions, despite the difference of opinion, the negro intends
to hold his own. He has a future, and that, too, in America. If
not, what mean these twenty-five years of progress in all lines of
industry--progress more marked than that
of any other people in the same length of time and under the same
circumstances? What means our great A. M. E. Church, with its
hundreds of thousands of communicants and its thousands of
preachers and teachers, its bishops and general officers? Surely
the history and growth of African Methodism in these United States
are an evidence not only of progress, but of permanence as well.
From a small seed--infinitesimally small as it were--has grown a
magnificent tree, as wonderful as it is magnificent. In every
State and Territory, wherever the negro is found, African
Methodism is known.

Its
greatest field is in the South. It is here that we find the
numbers both as to churches and as to membership--due, of course,
to the fact that the colored people are found there in larger
majorities than elsewhere.

The
present volume, which discusses African Methodism in Georgia and
Alabama, is another welcome addition to the Church
literature--emanating as it does from the pen of one who grew up
as it were in the Church, and who is thoroughly competent to state
the facts as he sees and knows them. Our distinguished friend, Rt.
Rev. Bishop W. J. Gaines, stood by the cradle of African Methodism
in its incipient stages in the State of Georgia--assisted in
nursing it until it became able to stand alone, and thereafter a
power throughout our Southern clime--whose influence is felt far
and wide.

No man of my acquaintance has done more for the
propagation of the Church of his choice than Bishop Gaines. Go
where you will, in Georgia especially, search the records of the
African M. E. Churches, examine the scrolls, and the name of Dr.
W. J. Gaines will be found to stand out in bold relief, not only
as a builder of churches, but as a wise and faithful shepherd; as
one who always reposed an unfaltering trust in God, however dark
the hour, and, therefore, as a pre-eminently successful pastor and
teacher. Such, then, is the writer of this volume. Certainly there
could not be found one who is more fitted to portray the growth of
African Methodism in the South than he whose name this volume
bears.

Born and reared in that section, a close
observer of the many vicissitudes--civil, political and
ecclesiastical--through which the South has passed during these
twenty-five years, a friend of reforms, a vigorous advocate of the
cause of temperance, an unswerving defender of the rights and
interests of his race--conservative rather than radical--with a
soul smitten with the love of virtue, with a ruling passion for
the true, the noble, the good and the beautiful in all the walks
of life--the Rt. Rev. Wesley J. Gaines may justly claim the right
to be an authority on the subjects discussed in this treatise. We
hail it with joy, and trust that it may be instrumental in
awakening a deeper interest in the spread of African Methodism in
this great country of ours, and that those into whose hands it may
fall may be inspired to go forth as doers of the Word and not
simply hearers.

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake.

She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—

Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits.

Most provocatively, she reveals how both the move toward colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly

Bayard Rustin is one of the most
important figures in the history of
the American civil rights movement.
Before Martin Luther King, before
Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin was working
to bring the cause to the forefront
of America's consciousness. A
teacher to King, an international
apostle of peace, and the organizer
of the famous 1963 March on
Washington, he brought Gandhi's
philosophy of nonviolence to America
and helped launch the civil rights
movement. Nonetheless, Rustin has
been largely erased by history, in
part because he was an African
American homosexual. Acclaimed
historian John D'Emilio tells the
full and remarkable story of
Rustin's intertwined lives: his
pioneering and public person and his
oblique and stigmatized private
self.

It was in the tumultuous 1930s that
Bayard Rustin came of age, getting
his first lessons in politics
through the Communist Party and the
unrest of the Great Depression.

A Quaker and a radical pacifist, he went to
prison for refusing to serve in World War II, only
to suffer a sexual scandal. His mentor, the great
pacifist A. J. Muste, wrote to
him, "You were capable of making the
'mistake' of thinking that you could
be the leader in a revolution...at
the same time that you were a
weakling in an extreme degree and
engaged in practices for which there
was no justification."

Commands to kill, to commit ethnic
cleansing, to institutionalize segregation,
to hate and fear other races and
religions—all are in the Bible, and all
occur with a far greater frequency than in
the Qur’an. But fanaticism is no more
hard-wired in Christianity than it is in
Islam. In
Laying Down the Sword, “one of
America’s best scholars of religion” (The
Economist) explores how religions grow
past their bloody origins, and delivers a
fearless examination of the most violent
verses of the Bible and an urgent call to
read them anew in pursuit of a richer, more
genuine faith. Christians cannot engage with
neighbors and critics of other
traditions—nor enjoy the deepest, most
mature embodiment of their own faith—until
they confront the texts of terror in their
heritage. Philip Jenkins identifies the
“holy amnesia” that, while allowing
scriptural religions to grow and adapt, has
demanded a nearly wholesale suppression of
the Bible’s most aggressive passages,
leaving them dangerously dormant for
extremists to revive in times of conflict.